The Office 2016 launch in September was followed by a steady stream of improvements in October. The Skype for Business iOS app is here, and the preview of the new Skype for Business voice and meeting capabilities is now more widely available. FastTrack evolved from an onboarding service to a customer success service to help you realize business value faster with the Microsoft Cloud. Compliance updates include enhanced service organization controls (SOC) audit reports and the launch of local datacenters in India. OneNote inking is better than ever, Sway and Office Lens got enhancements and mobile updates, and the new Office was updated as well. For developers, there’s new on-demand video training, updates from the PnP team and more.
The 10 Mac games you need to play from May 2015 Space shooting, steampunk golf, housekeeping, and a cat simulator—we've got options. MacOS Catalina - the new Mac operating system software - has arrived. Find out what you need to know, from whether you should install Catalina on your Mac, what new features it brings,. After all, they are the future of Mac gaming. Because of the hundreds of new Mac games popping up each month, we focus on quality and only highlight the games that deserve your attention. In addition, this page also covers the top upcoming Mac games for 2019 and beyond.
Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: September 2015.
Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates
Sway supports OneDrive for Business and adds mobile updates—Now when you sign in to Sway.com or Sway for Windows with Office 365 work and school accounts, you can access your OneDrive for Business account from the Insert tab, making it easy to add content stored in OneDrive for Business to your Sway creations. Updates to Sway for iPhone and iPad—such as faster preview and more grouping and navigation options—help you quickly create and share polished, interactive content on the go.
OneNote inking (digital handwriting) better than ever—OneNote on iPad now supports writing with the Pencil by FiftyThree stylus. You can take the notes, lists or sketches you made in the FiftyThree Paper app and send them to OneNote. OneNote for iPad Pro now supports the Apple Pencil stylus. A new feature, Ink Shape Recognition, is coming in November for iPad, iPad Pro and the OneNote Windows 10 app. For Surface users, a new Surface Pen and Pen Tip kit are now available.
Office Lens adds Office 365 support for iOS and enhanced business card scanning and storage—The pocket scanner app just got even more useful for business professionals, teachers and students. Office Lens for iPhone users can now share enhanced documents more securely using Office 365 work and school accounts. All Office Lens users for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone can use the Business Card mode to convert business card information into digital contacts in mobile address books.
Updates to the new Office—Office 2016 launched just last month and already new features are being delivered. Skype voice and video integration in Office Online and Outlook.com was expanded, so you can now see and speak to your Skype contacts. An Office Online extension for Chrome was introduced to give you a quicker way to access and create Office documents on Chrome. And improvements were made to Office on Android apps and the overall Visual Basic Editor (VBE) in Office 2016 for Mac.
Office 365 for Business and Education updates*
Office Delve adds Praise, Favorites and new ways to create content—With Praise (rolling out now to First Release U.S. customers), you can send publicly viewable praise to colleagues. With the new authoring canvas (rolling out now to eligible commercial customers), you can easily create multimedia-rich pages in SharePoint Online. Favorites, which gives you a new way to save information from across Office 365, is available now in the Delve mobile app for iOS and rolling out in the browser experience to First Release customers.
The new Visio is here—Visio 2016 starter diagrams, hundreds of smart shapes, one-step data linking, Information Rights Management (IRM) for compliance and much more make working visually faster and easier than ever. With Visio 2016 diagrams, everyone can easily define business processes, document best practices and visualize the future of initiatives. Using Office 365, you can share Visio diagrams with everyone and communicate one version of the truth to drive organization-wide alignment.
Top teacher-requested features coming to OneNote Class Notebooks—Based on teacher and staff feedback, OneNote Class Notebooks are getting three new capabilities, enabling you to: easily remove a student’s or co-teacher’s permissions from a OneNote Class Notebook; add groups of students (such as a class list) to a OneNote Class Notebook; and grab updates in group membership from your school directory. These improvements are rolling out to education customers in the coming weeks and will be released for OneNote Staff Notebooks soon.
Preview of new Skype for Business voice and meeting capabilities in Office 365 is expanding—The PSTN Conferencing preview is now available in 14 more countries, and the Cloud PBX preview is available worldwide. For users of the PSTN Calling preview in the U.S., number portability has been enabled, and for Cloud PBX customers worldwide, voicemail has been enabled. Soon several IP phone models will become available for preview with Cloud PBX, and a call quality dashboard will be added.
The evolution of FastTrack from onboarding service to customer success service—FastTrack is changing from a one-time benefit to an ongoing benefit and expanding to offer customized support and resources for envisioning, onboarding and driving business value. FastTrack now consists of best practices, tools, resources and personalized remote assistance available through a new web experience (FastTrack.microsoft.com) and the FastTrack Center.
Office 365 services now delivered in India from local datacenters—With the launch of three new datacenters in India—in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai—Office 365 becomes the first global commercial cloud service to provide productivity and collaboration services from within India. With the new datacenters, businesses in India receive the Office 365 security and compliance capabilities, as well as the added benefit of data residency, which is important to organizations in regulated industries.
The Financial Services Compliance Program is rolling out to all eligible customers in financial services—The Financial Services Compliance Program, which extends the standard Office 365, Azure, Intune and Microsoft Dynamics service contracts, provides an additional level of service to help fulfill regulatory needs. It includes: direct access to Microsoft security and compliance staff; information, data and reports related to meeting your unique regulatory obligations; and the ability to request paid one-on-one time to address key questions.
Skype for Business iOS app now available—The new app is now available in the iTunes Store. iPhone users with Lync 2013 will automatically get updated to the new app. iPad users with Lync 2013 need to download the app from the iTunes Store. With the new app, you can join a meeting in one touch, use full-screen video for a more immersive meeting experience, set up multi-factor authentication for enhanced security, and more.
Enhanced service organization controls (SOC) audit reports—Office 365 SOC audit reports have been enhanced with two new trust principles, Processing Integrity and Confidentiality. Controls and test results were also added around data transmission and encryption, security development lifecycle, data replication and data backup. These reports are designed to provide transparency into Office 365 security and compliance controls and the results of control tests as noted by independent third-party auditors.
Office 365 Developer updates
Dev Digest for October—This month’s highlights include code samples that show off the new Office.js APIs, an update to the Office 365 Unified API preview for how you access users’ OneDrive for Business, lots of exciting news from the Office 365 Developer PnP team, on-demand video training for setting up the ASP.NET MVC web application and building the iOS or Android mobile apps from scratch, upcoming hackathons and more. As always, get the list of new and updated dev documentation, code samples, add-ins, Office Dev podcasts, patterns and practices, blog posts, Office Store news and upcoming events.
Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide.
—Andy O’Donald @andyodonald
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*Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics.
Mac Games
Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president on the Office team.
Welcome to our first new Office update post in which we share the features we are delivering to our Office customers across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Office Online. This month we expanded Skype integration in Office Online, introduced an Office Online extension for Chrome and delivered improvements in Office on Android and Office 2016 for Mac.
We have several exciting new updates this month and hope you enjoy them!
New Mac Games October 2015 Calendar
Skype voice and video integration with Office Online
Giving customers better ways to work together is core to the new Office. Last month, we delivered Skype in-app integration with Office 2016 on the desktop and we promised that was just a first step. Now we’re taking Skype integration to the next level, first in Office Online and, over time, in the desktop apps, as well. Today we are announcing Skype voice and video integration in Office Online (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Online) and in Outlook.com, so that you can now see and speak to your Skype contacts. The integration creates a natural, collaborative experience in which you can co-author and have a conversation using instant messaging or video calling right from within a document. Best of all, your instant messaging history stays connected to the document, so that the next time you open it, you can pick right up where you left off. Office Online exists to help you collaborate with anyone, anywhere, with just a browser. Now with Skype communication built right in, you can get more done, faster.
Skype integration with Office Online will be available to customers worldwide with a Microsoft account in November.
New Mac Games October 2015 Free
A quicker way to access and create Office documents on Chrome browser
We want to bring Office to you wherever you are. If you use Chrome, there is a new extension that lets you create and open Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Sway documents using Office Online right from the Chrome browser. You can also use the extension to open and view existing Office documents stored on OneDrive, on OneDrive for Business and on your computer right from Chrome. Click here using the Chrome browser to get the new Office Online extension.
Additional Office Online enhancements
One of the coolest things about being able to update Office regularly is that we can now address customer feedback more rapidly. Based on your suggestions, this month we added an enhanced Navigation pane to help you work with large documents within Word Online. We also added a number of formatting improvements with Excel Online and made performance improvements to PowerPoint Online.
Office on Android
We put our Office on Android apps on a diet! You will see that our latest update reduced the apps footprint by 40 percent, and we’re going to keep working to get them down further. We also improved the sign up/sign in experience, so you can get started more quickly with your Microsoft account or Office 365 school or work account. Additionally, the Office apps are also now enterprise-ready with Android M support for Enterprise and compliant with Android for Work.
If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you can now use Presenter View in PowerPoint on Android to show and present your slides like a pro. View your presentation with speaker notes on your Android phone or tablet while projecting to a large screen.
Visual Basic Editor features come to Office 2016 for Mac
A lot of developers asked for improvements to the overall Visual Basic Editor (VBE) on Office 2016 for Mac, and we’re pleased to deliver several top customer requests. You now have the ability to Add Modules from within the Project Viewer, Add Library References using a Dialog and use shortcut keys for debugging. We also recently added two new commands to the Visual Basic object model for Mac: GrantAccessToMultipleFiles and AppleScriptTask and a new conditional, MAC_OFFICE_VERSION. For more information, see the VBE improvements section of the VBA improvements in Office 2016 blog post.
Get started
We have an exciting set of new features and functionality coming in the next few months and we look forward to sharing them with you as they become available. In the meantime, thank you for using Office and please continue to share your feedback and feature requests with us at Office UserVoice.
- Are you ready to purchase? Buy Office 365 to get the new 2016 apps at Office365.com.
- Do you want to learn more? Visit Office.com/2016.
- Get the Office apps on Android, iOS or Windows devices.
- To get started with Office Online, visit Office.com.